


Beautiful

by randomwriter57



Series: Reigisa Week 2017 [1]
Category: Free!
Genre: Beauty - Freeform, Character Study, Introspection, M/M, this is a very introspective fic wherein rei basically gushes about nagisa please forgive me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 19:04:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9338822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomwriter57/pseuds/randomwriter57
Summary: Rei had always harboured a deep-set admiration for beauty. By the age of fifteen, Rei was sure he knew exactly what was beautiful and what was not.Hazuki Nagisa changed that.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Reigisa Week 2017!!
> 
> Written for [Reigisa Week 2017](http://reigisaweek.tumblr.com/), Day One: Beauty.

Rei had always harboured a deep-set admiration for beauty. Even at a young age, his aesthetic tastes were refined, even if it went only as far as wanting all of his clothes and possessions to be purple. Of course, as he developed, so did his tastes, and by the age of fifteen, Rei was sure he knew exactly what was beautiful and what was not.

Hazuki Nagisa changed that. Like a tornado, Nagisa swept into his life and threw everything he knew to the winds. A more exact way of describing it would be to say that Nagisa helped to expand his views on what constituted as beautiful, but the way it happened felt much more sudden, much more extreme. After all, it wasn’t a gradual shift in perspective. One day, Rei was on the track team and abhorred swimming. The next, he strove to obtain the beauty he had seen performed through swimming. And though Haruka had been the one whose swimming he found beautiful, he could not deny that it was Nagisa who pushed that change in perspective.

It wasn’t only his view of swimming which changed. How could he forget, for instance, the day on which he first described Nagisa as beautiful? The thought had come into his mind, uncalled for but not unwelcome, as a sliver of drool pooled on Rei’s shoulder from the boy in question’s mouth. The _drool_ was not beautiful, of course, but he forgot his disgust when he noticed the soft lines of Nagisa’s face, the cascade of his fringe over his eyelids. How the sunset glowed behind them, casting light over his golden hair.

Equally unforgettable was the study session in which Rei almost told Nagisa that he was beautiful. As much as he cringed at the memory of his embarrassment after murmuring the words, not quiet enough to escape Nagisa’s hearing, the image preceding it remained unmarred. Nagisa’s eyebrows drawn together in a soft frown, his pink lips - which always looked so _soft_ , remarkably so, and Rei couldn’t help but wonder if Nagisa used lip balm and what flavour - pursed against the end of his pen, the curl of his fingers around the writing implement, the way the light seemed to blur the lines of where his hands ended and the pen began.

(“ _Beautiful_ ,” Rei whispered, and Nagisa’s head jolted up.

“Huh?”

Rei’s face bloomed in all shades of red, and he tried to stutter that it was nothing, and Nagisa laughed, and Rei couldn’t help but melt because _that_ was beautiful too, and there was no way he was going to survive the next few years of studying alongside this boy because he would give him a heart attack one of these days.)

Most precious to him were the more recent memories. Ones of light lashes brushing against freckled cheeks and rosy smiles under brighter eyes and lips - strawberry flavoured, unsurprisingly - parting to breathe his name. Moments where his cheeks burned with compliments and his eyes sparkled with excitement or mischief or a whole other mess of emotion, each one as beautiful as the last for the tiny differences which Rei is still learning to decipher.

Rei has always harboured a deep-set admiration for beauty. But it took burgundy eyes burning with truth and the words “Your jump was beautiful, Rei-chan” to show him how many things that admiration entailed. And Hazuki Nagisa was a million and one of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me at [randomactuallywrites-57](http://randomactuallywrites-57.tumblr.com) on tumblr | [@randomwriter57](http://twitter.com/randomwriter57) on twitter!


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